There are a lot of things in ST:TMP that I really like - specifically, a lot of ideas that I liked, and science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular had always been, at their best, idea-based. Unfortunately, ideas don’t necessarily translate into an interesting movie, and the pace was the killer with this…

That’s an interesting take on the franchise. I disagree with a lot of it, but it’s interesting. The first movie does clearly have a villain in V’Ger; even if it’s basically just a lost (and immensely upgraded) space probe looking for its creator (and thus a vastly-expanded remake of the TOS episode “The Changeling”),…

Without spoiling anything major:

I forgot to ask, have you seen “The Story of Marie and Julien?” One of my favorite lesser known Rivettes.

Thanks!

I’ve seen Duelle, but not Noirot. How do they compare in your view?

I saw Touch of Evil relatively young, and I’d never seen brownface in a movie before. I was just confused. I remember thinking his makeup looked weird, and concluding there’s no way he could be Mexican because that would be stupid.

Love Mr. Arkadin. I know you count it as your first Christmas movie, but its got a great paranoid atmosphere and gothic imagery that makes it perfect for Halloween. Unless you secretly have a really grim view of Christmas.

My mother used to have a rule that she wouldn’t decorate for Christmas until the Hallmark Channel did their first Christmas movie marathon. Now they do one like every single month.

Last year I must have watched Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy for 30 laugh-free minutes before I realized “hey, wait a minute . . . this isn’t Laurel and Hardy!”

A&C meet the Mummy exist solely for a pretty great joke in Futurama. A&C meet Frankenstein is great, the family and I watched it yesterday night as well. And as a double feature after my littlest guy went to bed we watched Clue with my 10 year old.  He seemed to get 90% of the risqué jokes but we had to explain to…

Hiya, Binky!

That sounds like the “Calvin & Hobbes” storyline where Calvin creates clones of himself to do the work he doesn’t feel like doing, but they are similarly unwilling to do any of it. I figured if I was in that situation we’d all starve because each would be waiting for the others to get food.

I was expecting The Student of Prague to be a version of William Wilson, so I was surprised how much it was a Faustian story which reminded me of Gogol’s The Portrait.

The little plane circling the globe has to be my favorite studio logo ever. 

Are you going to have the bees moved? I assume there’s a queen in there somewhere. Sorry, I just worry about the future of bees everywhere. If they die, we die. Carry on.

Mad Love is excellent for its black humor, and of course Lorre’s performance. I particularly love the gallows conversation between the reporter and the prisoner about Hoover Dam. The prisoner is about to be killed, but he wants to know about Hoover Dam.

“I say, there should be a total ban on making new movies for the next ten years so that the world can get caught up on the movies that already exist.”

When it’s a dry heat, that’s fine. I can deal with that. I grew up with that. But over the last five years or so, the humidity in California has absolutely spiked, and suddenly our summers are dripping wet messes, but it never, ever rains. I hate it. Thanks, climate change!

I can’t wait for fall and some cooler weather. I’m in southern California, and it’s been in the 80s and 90s for the better part of four months. Sick to DEATH of it. Sick of wearing shorts every day, too. I’m going to Virginia to visit my sister and then to Canada for a month, and I can’t wait to get out of the ick for…